![the story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease summary (lieberman) the story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease summary (lieberman)](https://www.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-images_parent/migrated-images_59/ashton-eaton-training_fe.jpg)
It doesn’t mean that human beings are going backward or that all our hard-won adaptations, like big brains and springy legs, have lost their value. Therefore, Lieberman proposes an ominous new term: dysevolution. Natural selection lacks the time to correct mismatches because cultural evolution moves so much faster today than biological evolution. Feet: It could still swing from branches, but its foot was stiff and slightly arched with long toes, the mark of a walker and a climber. Its spine was S-shaped and its neck vertically oriented, two other adaptations stemming from bipedalism. Bipedal: Walking upright, especially when having to trek long distances for food, was more efficient than four-footed rambling. Flat nose and massive jaws: Thick molars and large chewing muscles broke down the tough stems and roots of its diet. He later warns me “a majority of readers of the book are likely to suffer from and die from a mismatch disease.” He also counts broad-scale infectious diseases as mismatches, though they’ve been mostly tamed in developed nations.Īustralopithecus afarensis About 4 million years ago in Africa, a four-legged, chimpanzeelike hominin with a small brain atop a wide face stood on its hind legs and walked. Lieberman lists obesity, Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, hypertension and certain reproductive cancers as hypothesized noninfectious mismatch disorders, and likewise asthma, allergies, chronic insomnia, cavities, anxiety and depression, fallen arches, myopia and back pain. The Industrial Revolution, starting 250 years ago, accelerated cultural changes and left our bodies more out of sync with our environment. Hence the mismatch and, Lieberman contends, diseases that arise out of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Life in settlements rapidly exposed human beings to novel foods, diseases and customs. However, the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago disrupted the tortoise-like pace of adaptation. Randomly trying out new features, keeping what works (an adaptation) and rejecting what doesn’t, natural selection boosts an individual’s fitness and survival over another’s, to the benefit of the individual’s offspring. For a million and more years in Africa, evolution adapted their bodies and behaviors in a give-and-take with a slowly changing set of environmental conditions - that’s natural selection. It’s called the mismatch hypothesis: Our earliest, apelike ancestors foraged and hunted in small, mobile bands.
![the story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease summary (lieberman) the story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease summary (lieberman)](https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam/prh/books/305/305451/9780141986364.jpg)
His argument is not difficult, and he is not the first to advance it. Jim HarrisonĪn evolutionary perspective is critical to understanding the body’s pitfalls in a time of plenty, Lieberman suggests. Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman. Modern medicine has come up with treatments for them, but not solutions the deaths and disabilities continue to climb. These serious disorders share several characteristics: They’re chronic, noninfectious, aggravated by aging and strongly influenced by affluence and culture. Those are small potatoes compared with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease and many cancers also on the rise in the developed and developing parts of the world. Enclosed, cushioned shoes could lead to foot problems, including bunions, fungus between the toes and plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the tissue below weakened arches. Too much focusing on books and computer screens at a young age fostered myopia. My body had good reason to complain because it wasn’t designed for these accessories. What could be more normal?Īccording to the author, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard named Daniel Lieberman, shoes, books and padded chairs are not normal at all. “This chapter focuses on just three behaviors … that you are probably doing right now: wearing shoes, reading, and sitting.” OK, I was. Where were my glasses? My toes felt hot and itchy: My athlete’s foot was flaring up again. When I glanced out the window, the garden looked fuzzy. I squirmed to relieve an ache in my lower back. It was the sort of book guaranteed to make me increasingly, uncomfortably aware of my own body. I sat in my padded desk chair, hunched over, alternately entering notes on my computer and reading a book called The Story of the Human Body.